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effective learning community teaching methods. Most institutions have adequate
material in their faculty professional development offices to get you started in the right
direction.
Kent State offers a wide array of training, workshop, consultation, and other
faculty development opportunities. Much of the technical assistance available is
designed to help faculty progress in new modalities, including learning communities
programs and web-based instruction. Kent State’s office of Faculty and Professional
Development provided office space and funds for released time and course material to
help the director develop curriculum for the three courses offered by the Columbus
Program.
We developed a communication model that afforded participants the opportunity to
learn from other participants. The “identified” participants were the students, program
director, employers, and campus mentors. We are careful to reference “identified”
participants because there are many legitimate sources of teaching and learning; some we
recognize and many we do not. We used several methods/principles to facilitate
communication and enhance learning:
1) Limit traditional classroom lectures. Identify techniques that require students to
be active participants in class discussion. Assign material to prepare students for
speakers and presentations and allow adequate time for class discussion and
feedback. Have students prepare (in advance) questions and topics of interest for
each presentation and speaker. Develop methods to encourage and evaluate
participation. Approximately fifty percent of a student’s grade should be based
on their participation.
2) Assign several group projects. Public policy development is a group decision-
making process. We use group project assignments to simulate a problem
solving scenario. Group project assignments afford students opportunities to
develop leadership skills, experiment with consensus building, learn to adjust to
constraints, and explore other dynamics of group decision making.
Convention